IAI Conference. International Agrichar initiative
Some initial thoughts and reactions.
A two day talk fest near Sydney, NSW Australia just finished.
About 150+ people attended.
Wall to wall Ph.D's in every discipline know to man, soil biology, engineering, microbiology, microbiology, material science, archeology, ecology, agriculture and even two farmers and two gardeners.
No politicians, little (virtually nil) press.
The IAI hopes to have all the papers up on their website in two to three weeks. (depending on author copyright permission)
The papers/proceedings will be well worth a day or two's browse if you are seriously interested in
TP.
Hopefully they will also have the poster presentations which I found especially interesting and did not get time to study in more detail.
I took extensive notes of lectures and would be happy to help explain any lectures that might be a bit brief and truncated in a web PP presentation.
I will make a few posts about the conference over the next little while when my head stops spinning.
People were very nice, friendly and talkative even if sometimes suffering from a touch of Aspergers
Judging from the limited number of people I was able to talk to (I should have stayed for dinner and field trips) and some good guessing there was:-
No one from hypography , I person from permaculture,(the guy who started the
TP link there) and about six from the Bio, Terra preta mailing-list.
People really wanted a hypography type forum. I tried to get the organizers to promote the forum (S) but failed.(They set a cracking pace with little time for digression)
Perhaps Hypog will be mentioned when all the papers come out.
All presentations where excellent.
Power Point and USB devices have certainly changed the world of "chalk and talk"
Again on the small sampling of people I was able to talk to; People seemed to divide into
1) those who want to make money from selling char machines,bio-oil, green coal, big agribusiness etc
2) those who had research careers in the area and tended mostly (but not always) to focus on minutiae
3) those who really didn't know much about
TP at all. and were looking for more information. They looked a bit bemused by it all
4) people concerned about global warming
5) those wanting to do, or encourage more research.
I sat down to lunch yesterday with a farmer from Bolivia, a person from Epidra USA, a NZlander connected with their Govt primary industries and a Englishman who explains new technologies to business. Quite a range of countries and occupations.
The lecturer comment that sticks in my head the most?
Dr. Johannes Lehmann, (Cornell soil scientist and author of Amazonian Dark Earths) had a great photo of
TP soil going down a metre or two. There were stacks more pottery shards in the soil than I ever imagined there would be. Some quite big bits, slabs almost, all the way down though the soil. I asked about this and he said not all
TP soils have pottery " If you go back to before they had pottery say 6,000 years ago you just get stone age artifacts."
If you think about this I think he was telling me that there is 6,000 year old soil in Brazil /tropics that is still fertile after all those years..!!!
No wonder
TP has not seeped into our collective consciousness yet.
It would be easier to believe in fairies at the bottom of my garden!
IAI Conference. International Agrichar initiative 
